This video from the USA is called Suharto is dead!!! How the US supported him -5/5.

In return, it is claimed, the country’s flag-carrier Garuda bought Rolls’s Trent 700 engines for its Airbus A330 aircraft.

Reponding to the allegations, Mr Suharto has strenuously denied that he received payment from the firm.

But speaking yesterday a spokesman for the SFO said: “We confirm that the director of the Serious Fraud Office
has opened a criminal investigation into allegations of bribery and corruption at Rolls-Royce.”

The manufacturing giant boasts major sites at Derby and Bristol, as well as employsing somewhere in the region of 45,000 people worldwide.

In March, the company appointed BP director Ian Davis, a former managing director of management consultancy McKinsey & Co, as chairman.

In a brief statement the firm said: “Further to our announcement of December 6 2012 relating to concerns about bribery and corruption in overseas markets, we have been informed by the Serious Fraud Office that it has now commenced a formal investigation into these matters.”

ROLLS-ROYCE faced accusations yesterday of outsourcing hundreds of high-tech engineering jobs “by the back door.” The aerospace giant has announced it is to open a new engineering production site in Bangalore in India, with the creation of 500 jobs. But at the same time it is carrying out a “global restructuring exercise” with the loss of 2,600 posts in Britain: here.

INDONESIANS demanded at the start of the International People’s Tribunal yesterday that the “vicious cycle of denial” about the country’s 1965 coup and massacre must end. Nursyahbani Katjasungkana, an Indonesian rights activist and former MP who helped set up the tribunal, said the government in Jakarta needed to be held to account for crimes committed in the past: here.

The study of the 1965-1966 killings in Indonesia, and for that matter the study of the country’s politics more generally, will never be the same again with the recent release of the documentary film The Act of Killing (21 August 2012, Toronto International Film Festival), directed by Joshua Oppenheimer with co-director Christine Cynn. The film’s protagonists are leading figures in the local paramilitary organisation Pemuda Pancasila [Pancasila Youth], who were responsible for the killings of hundreds of real or suspected communists in North Sumatera in 1965-1966, as part of a nationwide program that took approximately one million lives.

Although testimonies and published analyses of the event have slowly emerged, it is one of those topics that most people have some knowledge about, but prefer not to discuss even in private.

The result of seven years of hard work, involving many hundreds of hours of footage, the documentary radically challenges some of the old and familiar assumptions in the study of politics and violence. It also demonstrates an ingenious method of documentary filmmaking that will be of special interest to students of media studies, history, visual ethnography, and the anthropology of media.

Undoubtedly, human rights activists and institutions will have a deep interest in the way this film penetrates the entrenched impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators of one of the worst massacres in modern history. Some of the leaders of the groups responsible for the massacre still hold government offices at local and national levels today.

All currently existing films with a focus on the 1965 killings and [their] aftermath (as distinct from those that present the same events only in the background of their story)2 are dedicated to giving a voice to the survivors and members of their families, occasionally with sympathetic comments from experts. These films have broken the general onscreen silence that has lasted for over a quarter of a century. To my knowledge, a total of 16 such documentaries have been produced, most of them in small circles, by individual survivors,3 local non-governmental organisations4 and filmmakers,5 in addition to three titles by foreign filmmakers.6

All these documentaries show the ordeals of the victims and the various forms of their victimisation. Made with low budgets and very basic technology, most of these locally produced documentaries feature talking heads from among the survivors and eye-witnesses. Frail and aged-looking women appear in many of these films, speaking emotionally about their endless agony and presenting their condemnations against the past injustice and the continued failure on the part of the successive governments to acknowledge it.7

Individually and collectively, those films have merits of their own, and their importance to the fledgling efforts to unearth the buried history cannot be over-emphasised. However, due to their limited circulation, but also to the successful anti-communist propaganda that has been deeply embedded and normalised in the public consciousness since 1966, these documentaries have yet to make any significant impact in public. For now, their impact is certainly too limited to undermine the New Order propaganda. These previous films presented a counter-claim that boldly reversed the positions of good versus evil that were firmly implanted in the nation’s history by successive governments and their supporters, best exemplified in the nearly four-and-a-half-hour anti-communist state-produced film entitled Pengkhianatan G 30 September (1984).

However, a reversal of this kind only reproduces, and does not eliminate or problematise, the fundamental framework of a good versus evil dichotomy that structures the government propaganda and public imagination. While giving voice to the silenced victims, the perpetrators of the 1965-1966 killings did not appear in these alternative films. In government sponsored propaganda and off-screen statements, whenever these perpetrators (or their sponsors and supporters) speak of the events, their statements consist mainly of denials along with the frequent placing of blame on the victims.

In remarkable contrast, The Act of Killing is fascinating as much as disturbing for its radical subversion of the prevailing paradigm, in that it presents a narrative of the killings in a complex story, with multi-layered sub-narratives, rich with ironies and contradictions. An adequate discussion of the significance and problematics that this film brings to the fore is far beyond the scope of this brief article. Here I can only mention in the simplest terms some of the most obvious aspects that will have immediate impact for our current scholarship on the issue.

The Act of Killing graphically visualizes acts of violence that make the horrors in the previous documentaries (allusions to anti-communist captors, torturers, rapists), as well as in Pengkhianatan G 30 September (the evils of an allegedly communist-backed movement against six rightist generals and one lieutenant on the eve of 1 October 1965) pale into insignificance. In this respect, The Act of Killing incriminates the perpetrators of the 1965-1966 killings more seriously than any of the preceding films have done. But this new documentary goes much further than simply validating or reinforcing the survivors’ allegations about the cruelty of the military-orchestrated anti-communist pogrom.

Instead of submitting new ‘facts’ or a set of serious ‘evidence’ about the crimes against humanity in 1965-1966, The Act of Killing presents an abundance of extravagantly-styled self-incriminations by the 1965 executioners themselves, as they speak proudly to the camera about how they pushed their cruelty to the extreme when killing the communists and members of their families, and raping their female targets, including children. In front of the camera, they go on to demonstrate step-by-step how they carried out the killings at the original sites of their actions in 1965, thus making the survivors’ allegations of their crimes redundant. The Act of Killing exposes in a most obscene fashion what the successive Indonesian governments since 1966 have erased from official history and government pronouncements.

More than one of the perpetrators in this film observes perceptively that ‘their’ film will outdo the government’s infamous Pengkhianatan G 30 September in portraying scenes of horrendous violence. They remark that the general public is utterly wrong to assume (in line with New Order government propaganda) that the Communists are cruel or brutal; “We are crueler and more brutal than the Communists”, they claim. They elaborate what they mean in great detail, both through words and re-enactments on camera. The film contains some of the most violent scenes and language I have seen or heard, on or off screen, from or on Indonesia.

Viewers need to have a strong stomach to watch this film.

Questions raised

However, violent scenes and perverted language are only a part of the image that this film presents. The Act of Killing is unusual in the series of documentaries on the theme to date; it is the first long film on the 1965-1966 killings to feature the perpetrators, instead of the survivors or their sympathisers, as the main characters. This is only possible with the consent of those individual executioners, especially as they appear without their identities being concealed.

They recollect their own crimes, most of the time laughing, singing and dancing, and only occasionally with remorse and reported nightmares.

Three closely-related sets of questions came up in my mind when I first saw two earlier and shorter versions of the film in 2010 and 2011. Some clues began to dawn on me after watching the final and longer version in 2012, and after having further conversations with Oppenheimer, the director.

JAKARTA, Oct 27 2012 (IPS) – If the caste system existed in Indonesia the 10 elderly people who live in Jakarta’s Kramat Street would surely be untouchables: for decades they and their families have been banned from jobs and access to education and, until 2005, their identity cards marked them as former political prisoners. They are survivors of the 1965-66 military crackdown on the now outlawed Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), during which time between 500,000 and three million people were massacred and thousands tortured and imprisoned without trial: here.

Declassified documents published last week confirm that the US government was intimately involved in the campaign of mass murders conducted by the Indonesian military and Islamic organisations during the 1965-66 coup led by General Suharto: here.

JAKARTA, Indonesia — A landmark decision striking down an Indonesian book-banning law that has been used since the days of ex-dictator Suharto to clamp down on dissent was welcomed Thursday by historians, authors and rights activists.

For more than four decades, the attorney general’s office could unilaterally prohibit publication or distribution of books deemed “offensive” or a “threat to public order.”

But the Constitutional Court ruled Wednesday such power should rest with a judicial court.

“It’s great,” said historian Hilmar Farid. “It symbolizes the end of a period of darkness for all of us. It will allow future generations to learn the truth about everything, from science to history.”

Suharto stepped down in 1998 after 32 years of dictatorial rule, leading to reforms in the predominantly Muslim nation of 237 million that freed the media, vastly improved human rights and gave citizens the right for the first time to directly pick their leaders.

Though the country is now seen as one of the most democratic in the region, some authoritarian policies remain in place, such as a continuing ban on communist and other left-wing organizations.

A group of authors and publishers whose books were banned last year asked the Constitutional Court to review the 1963 regulation that allowed it.

Their books — and others — touched on sensitive topics like separatist-torn Papua province, inter-religious conflicts, the role of the military and even scientific research.

In striking down the law, Judge Mohammad Mahfud told the court: “Any banning of books must be done through the legal process in a court.”

Hundreds of books have been banned since the 1960s, including almost all 34 books and essays by late Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an outspoken democracy advocate who spent 14 years in jail during Suharto’s reign.

In the last year alone, the government banned “Pretext for Mass Murder,” a book about the role of the military in Suharto’s rise to power by John Roosa, a professor at the University of British Colombia, and four other books written by Indonesians.

“It will give students the change to learn about the past from different perspectives,” he said, noting that history books continue to blame the Communist Party for an apparent abortive coup in 1965 that helped Suharto rise to power.

Videos showing the torture of West Papuans by occupying Indonesian soldiers have embarrassed the Indonesian government ahead of a scheduled visit in November by US President Barack Obama: here.

Captured on video, the Indonesian military’s torture of two Papuans in May highlights the extent of the violence and intimidation that exists throughout Papua: here.

During the Reagan years, there was no greater champion of Suharto than Wolfowitz, whose career is a textbook example of Cold War politics that focused for nearly 50 years on the care and feeding of dictators like Suharto, Chun Doo-hwan in South Korea, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.

Almost every rosy prediction made by the Iraq war’s architect has fallen flat. …

Wolfowitz’s high-stakes bungling and erroneous forecasts have helped sacrifice more precious commodities: thousands of lives, billions of taxpayer dollars and much of the global goodwill America enjoyed after Sept. 11. …

“We hope that next time the rockets will be more accurate and effective in getting rid of this virus, and his like, who wreak corruption in the Arab land of Iraq and in Palestine,” Jumblatt said.

Like a true chickenhawk, Mr Wolfowitz will now get a cushy job in banking about which he knows nothing, supposed to benefit poor people about whom he knows less than nothing, rather than go to the luxury hotel in Baghdad which was fired at during his stay, for a second time … let alone join the army in Iraq …